How to set a clear Facebook Advertising strategy

Want to set a clear Facebook Advertising strategy?

A few years ago using Facebook to create a community around a brand was easier, I call that, the pre-algorithm era.

The algorithm reduces the organic reach of business pages posts, and building a community around a brand it’s much more difficult.
Facebook remains an important part of a digital marketing strategy, it can be used to nurture our fans with valuable content and to run display ads.

1. Identify our business goals

The first activity to do is to identify our business goals and our audiences. This phase can be applied every time you need to set up a strategy for every kind of social media platform.

In order to make an effective strategy, it’s important that each Ads goal can be directly linked with a clear business goal.
A good Ads goal need to have specific characteristics:

Specific;
Measurable;
Achievable;
Relevant;
Timely (it has to be reached in a precise amount of time).

We want that every activity that we run can give us answers whether our strategy is working or not.
As you can see in the image below, to define a clear strategy it’s important to start thinking about our business mission and then, move down into the funnel, in order to align all our tactics with our real business needs.

2. Identify the Promotional story and the Communication story

Now that you have a view of your strategy it is important to identify the story that we want to promote (Promotional story) in order to create results for our business, and the story that we want to communicate (Communication story), the one that communicates the brand values, in order to create a relationship with our community.
To make an example:

Promotional story:

Discounted merchandising, prepare a set of Ads that drive traffic to an e-commerce.
Communication story:
Positivity and self-awareness contents, share on the facebook page quotes, and interesting articles related to the main topics/product category of our business.

3. Identify our Facebook Ads goals

Now that we have a map of the goals that we want to reach with our strategy and a clear view of the stories that we will go to develop, let’s move forward in defining the goals for Facebook Ads.

Here the list of goals:

Awareness:
This goal can be a must have when launching a new product or when we want to find new clients for our business.
We will go to pay a “cost per impression” when we set this kind of Ads goal.

Trigger:
If our business goal is to show a specific content/offer on our website to users, this Facebook Ads goal is perfect for our strategy.
We will go to pay a “cost per click” when we set this kind of Ads goal.

Engage:
If we want that our audience will make a certain activity on our website, like clicking on a CTA (call to action) or play a video, this is an engagement goal. It’s a sign that our audience shows a much higher interest in our business.
We will go to pay a “cost per engagement” when we set this kind of Ads goal.

Consider:
This goal is a very important one to have in our strategy because we ask to our audience to subscribe to our newsletter or to leave their email in order to download a content. We are creating leads to our business.
We will go to pay a “cost per lead” when we set this kind of Ads goal.

Buy:
The ultimate conversion, if we run an e-commerce website this is the most important Ads goal that we can set. We lead audiences to buy our products/services.
We will go to pay a “cost per sale” when we set this kind of Ads goal.
As you can see in the image below, we can organize the Ads goals in a funnel, that can guide the creation of a Facebook advertising strategy.
Every time that we set a campaign on facebook asking which advertising goals we want to reach are critical to spend advertising money in a much more strategic way.

In the next articles, I will cover in detail how to set an advertising campaign on facebook, if you want to know more about specific topics about Digital marketing, say hello to commission@wowcracy.com and I will deliver content that you need to grow your business.